Tuesday, March 3, 2015

What does it all mean? What does it tell us about the culture and what does the story tell us about how therapy is practiced?

Emily Bazelon has written a long and thoroughly-researched article about the
relationship between Stanford undergraduate Ellie Clougherty and Silicon Valley
entrepreneur Jon Lonsdale.

We are left to examine, not only
Clougherty’s charges of sexual abuse, rape and psychological kidnapping, but
also the role that therapists played in allowing her to formulate the narrative
that she used to understand her experience.

Clougherty’s therapists-- helped
by her mother-- persuaded her that she was the victim of a predatory older man.
She was a Catholic virgin before she met Lonsdale, the conservative Jewish libertarian
who is now accused of having inflicted severe psychological and physical harm
on her.

Bazelon only mentions the
political and religious differences in passing, but the story of an evil Jewish conservative preying on an innocent Catholic girl ought to raise a few warning flags.

Clearly, Clougherty was naïve and
inexperienced. Just as clearly, she suffered, apparently from the relationship
itself, and from the fact that it did not end in marriage.

But, whatever she pain Lonsdale
afflicted, Clougherty was also the victim of an ambient culture that imposed a
narrative that framed and diminished her experience.

Today, the relationship has
entered the world of competing lawsuits, charges and countercharges. Clougherty moved back to Virginia and finished her degree online. While she still wants to work in the tech world,
she now sees herself as an advocate for abused women.

Bazelon concludes her article
thusly:

He says
he’s relieved to finally confront her accusations in open court. She says going
public is liberating. “Now I’m free to live my life, knowing I sent this up
into the world and more people can respond to it other than just me.” She has
no plans to return to Silicon Valley and says she wants to advocate on behalf
of abused women. She’s also looking for a path involving brain research and
tech that would include social activism. “My only fear now is that people will
judge me, and then if I become a neuroscientist, they won’t believe what I have
to say,” she said a few days after filing suit. “It’s a risk, but I have to do
this.”

Clougherty has abandoned her
career plans in order to take up a cause. In effect, she has sacrificed her
hopes and dreams to become a martyr for a cause.

One might say that, for her, the
gesture is a consolation. She seems to prefer seeing herself as a powerless
victim than imagining that she agreed to participate in experiences that she
felt were degrading. Apparently, it’s the best that certain therapists can do.

A self-described good Catholic
girl, Clougherty had wanted to save her virginity for marriage. So, we are
within our rights to ask whether she would have employed the same narrative if
she had married Lonsdale.

Were the sex acts she seems to
have consented to intrinsically abusive, or did they become so when the couple
broke up? Or did they become abusive when she discovered that she, an
undergraduate was not being treated as an equal by Lonsdale’s friends?

One hesitates to doubt any woman’s
word on so serious a matter, but one recalls Laura Kipnis’s description of Clougherty’s
situation. Clearly, Kipnis does not sympathize with Ellie Clougherty:

The New York Times Magazine recently reported on
the tangled story of a 21-year-old former Stanford undergraduate suing a
29-year-old tech entrepreneur she’d dated for a year. He’d been a mentor in a
business class she was enrolled in, though they’d met long before. They
traveled together and spent time with each other’s families. Marriage was
discussed. After they broke up, she charged that their consensual relationship
had actually been psychological kidnapping, and that she’d been raped every
time they’d had sex. She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a
woman’s body. She demanded that Stanford investigate and is bringing a civil
suit against the guy—this despite the fact that her own mother had introduced
the couple, approved the relationship every step of the way, and been in more
or less constant contact with the suitor.

In Bazelon’s account Clougherty lost her virginity to
Lonsdale in a hotel room in Rome. Since they had agreed to share the room
before their arrival, one imagines that Clougherty had freely decided to
consummate her relationship at that time, in that place. There is no suggestion that she changed her mind at any time during the consummation.

Clougherty had very little experience in romantic
relationships with men. Tall and beautifully striking, she had been ogled and harassed by men since she was a
girl and was very sensitive to unwanted sexual advances.

Before she met Lonsdale she had attended numerous events in
the tech world, a world which was mostly male and whose denizens mostly saw her
as a prospective love interest. She did not know how to deal with the situation
and developed an eating disorder. She had to fly home and seek treatment,
finally in a clinic:

At the
tech events that Clougherty went to, she was one of few women, and when men
pursued her, she often felt overwhelmed and intimidated. She told her mother
about it and could feel Anne’s concern radiating through their daily texts and
phone calls. In the winter of her sophomore year, Clougherty developed an
eating disorder. “I wanted to be invisible,” she told me. Alarmed, Anne flew
from Virginia and spent two weeks on campus trying to get her daughter back on
track.

But
Clougherty was struggling, and she withdrew from her classes and went home for
therapy for her eating disorder, including eight days of inpatient treatment.

After whatever happened in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty
engaged in a relationship. Clougherty’s friend, Rachel described the scene.

Bazelon reports:

Spending
evenings with Lonsdale and Clougherty, Rachel felt like a third wheel. She also
found Lonsdale condescending. When Lonsdale hosted dinners at his house with
other executives, Rachel said, she and Clougherty were sometimes the only
women, and Rachel felt they were belittled. Sometimes Clougherty would sit on
his lap. “It was like she was the pretty wallpaper,” Rachel said. He talked
about marrying Clougherty and made jokes like, “‘I have no power with you — I’m a
powerful man but I’m at
your mercy,’” Rachel said. Clougherty told me that she
wanted to believe she and Lonsdale could eventually be equals, using their
joint influence for good. “I thought it would be so nice to have the
chance to have an impact,” she said. “There are respectable women married to
respectable guys in the valley. I wanted to think, I could be happy like that,
too.”

Note that Clougherty, an undergraduate, sees herself as the
equal of a Silican Valley entrepreneur. She is offended that she and her friend
are treated like undergraduates by the tech entrepreneurs. Apparently, they
believe that their accomplishments are equal to those of the men around them,
regardless of what they have accomplished. One does not need to use too many
little gray cells to figure out where she learned that.

Note also that Clougherty also saw herself as a respectable
woman who could be married to a respectable guy. For many women, being
respectable is enormously important. In some cases a woman will believe that
there are certain sex acts that a respectable woman does not perform, period. She
will not perform them, even for her husband. And some women believe that sex
acts that might have signaled a lack of respectability can be redeemed by
marriage.

At the very least Cougherty seems to have been of two minds
about her sexual activities:

In
emails Clougherty wrote at the time, she told Lonsdale that she found him
attractive. “Kiss kiss kiss, you are super handsome,” she wrote in June, and
later, “You are a sexy man” and “It was so nice sleeping with you.” But around
the same time, she also told Rachel that she never wanted to have sex with
Lonsdale, beginning in Rome. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be having sex, but
he’s not listening to me,’” Rachel said.

Lonsdale seemed to be confused:

The
first [email from him to Clougherty] read: “Sometimes I feel it’s very clear
you are eager to engage sexually, but other times you will talk about me taking
advantage of you and forcing myself on you as if there is this dirty old
man/young innocent student dynamic, and I should feel badly about it. We will
do something and then just a bit later you’ll talk as if ‘how can I stop you
from making me do that?’ and yet earlier I honestly thought you wanted to.”

At one juncture in the relationship, Clougherty started
feeling that her status was changing. Instead of being a girlfriend and a
potential spouse, she started feeling like a booty call. Worse yet, Lonsdale was
spending less time with her, something she saw as a bad sign.

If Clougherty was feeling abandoned, she must also have been
feeling that she had given up her virginity for nothing.

Later, a therapist would convince her that she had suffered
from psychological kidnapping. Perhaps it's too obvious, but feeling that your boyfriend is abandoning you is
not the same as feeling psychologically kidnapped. To correct the apparent
contradiction you would need to think that the distancing is a manipulative
manoeuver designed to make her more dependent.

Bazelon reports the situation:

Lonsdale
hit a crucial period of fund-raising for Formation 8, and Clougherty expressed
resentment when he would ask her to come over late at night. He responded impatiently.
“I don’t know what analogy makes sense to you, and Odysseus is probably not the
right one,” he wrote in the fall. “But I am on a really big, difficult,
critical mission the next several weeks.” It would be hard for the relationship
to work, he warned, “if my darling is actually just sort of annoyed at me and
isn’t in a position where of course she is eager to see me anytime I can.”

Perhaps Clougherty was distressed because she was not
engaged. Perhaps she was distressed because she saw that she would not be
marrying Lonsdale. Perhaps she was distressed because she did not feel like an
equal.

As her relationship ended, she fell into despair and anguish, probably for feeling that she had lost her self-respect.

Whatever the reason, Clougherty was clearly in trouble. Her
mother flew to California to help her daughter. She brought a book that offered
a narrative explanation for Clougherty’s anguish.

In Bazelon’s words:

Clougherty’s
fragility reminded Anne of the state her daughter was in when she had to leave
school more than a year earlier. She decided to go to California again. On the
flight, she read a book suggested by a friend who had been in an abusive
relationship called “Why
Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men,” by a
domestic-violence counselor, Lundy Bancroft. The book riveted Anne. She saw
Lonsdale in the descriptions of an abuser and she saw Clougherty in the role of
a victim in denial. Anne got to Stanford bent on an urgent rescue. “I was bringing
my daughter home no matter what,” she said.

Clougherty’s despair sounded to one psychologist like a
clear case of post-traumatic stress. One hastens to note that this diagnostic
category has lately been applied to far too many cases.

The psychologist also believed that the victim narrative
made a lot of sense.

Another therapist, Keith Saylor, with whom Clougherty
consulted in Virginia taught her how to reconstruct her experience within the
bounds of a narrative that made her a helpless and hopeless victim.

Bazelon summarizes the approaches taken by two therapists,
one a psychologist at Stanford, another Keith Saylor:

She
said that Lonsdale had forced her to have sex when she didn’t want to and also
talked about the man who accosted her in the restaurant bathroom when she was
10. The university psychologist noted in a report that she “seems to have
symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from current and past trauma.”
Clougherty went home to Virginia and spent days crying and rocking in a corner
of her family’s living room. Clougherty embarked on therapy twice a week with
Keith Saylor, a clinical psychologist who treated her eating disorder. He used
prolonged-exposure therapy, a treatment
developed for combat-related disorders, in which a therapist prompts a
patient to describe deeply traumatic events. Later, patients listen to tapes of
their sessions at home every day in an attempt to drain the memories of their
power.

As he
typically does when conducting prolonged-exposure therapy, Saylor reflected
back Clougherty’s account, saying that she had experienced “multiple traumas
over a prolonged period of time that did repeated damage.” In one session, he
told Clougherty, repeating her words, that Lonsdale “held you captive,” continuing,
“You were essentially brainwashed over a year.”

Bazeon listened to the therapy tapes herself. I quote
her description at length:

On the
tapes, Clougherty swallows sobs and speaks in a thin, small voice. She
described particular sexual acts that she didn’t want to take part in and how
Lonsdale cajoled, begged and insisted until she gave in. She also said that
during sex he slapped and shoved her and put his hands around her neck. “It was
rape in a sadomasochist way nine times a day,” she said. In a later session,
Saylor again mirrored what she told him: “You didn’t have personal agency, you
didn’t have personal choice, all of those things had been robbed from you.”

Before
she went into therapy, Clougherty told me, she didn’t want to admit even to
herself that she had been raped. She wanted to believe that the relationship
was loving, and she also felt she had a lot to lose. “It was like I could call
him a rapist, and I could get judged and get in big trouble and not know how to
handle it or I could say, ‘He’s great, look at these emails, I want to date
that person,’” she said. “Trauma
therapy was the first time I felt allowed to talk about how I felt.”

She now
calls it a “psychological kidnapping,” a term she came up with after watching a
video about domestic abuse on the Internet, and she says she was raped every
time she and Lonsdale had sex. Saylor, who agreed to speak with me at Clougherty’s
request, said, “People in these kinds of dramatic circumstances sometimes don’t
tell anyone.” He also said that prolonged-exposure therapy doesn’t “encourage
perspective-taking” and that Lonsdale might have an entirely different view of
the relationship. “My role is not to question her veracity but to help her get
well.”

Saylor might have believed he was offering a version of cognitive therapy, his approach had less to with science and more to do with forgiving sins and offering a
special kind of absolution, a kind in which the individual does not need to
take any responsibility for her actions.

He was absolving Clougherty of all responsibility for
anything that happened. The notion that every time she had sex with Lonsdale
was a rape seems contradicted by some of the facts we know.

Saylor told Clougherty that she was a mere victim, that she
did not exercise free will at any time in the course of the relationship. Might
we not recognize that this is wildly judgmental, that it defames and slanders
Lonsdale and that it tells Clougherty that she was a mere puppet, manipulated
by a brutal male oppressor.

Besides, if she was so easily manipulated by a male oppressor, how can we know whether she was also being manipulated by her therapist?

In essence, Saylor seemed to be saying that Clougherty’s
experiences were not hers. Thus, perhaps she can now tell herself that she
remains innocent. And yet, once she went public with her allegations, the world
would see her within the context of those experiences.

Would it not have been better for Clougherty to take
responsibility for some of her decisions? If she bears no responsibility, then
she is being diminished and also deprived of the power to do anything more than
to make her narrative, with herself in the starring role, part of a larger a
cause.

In other words, she was given no chance of escaping the narrative. Therapy taught her to sacrifice herself for a cause.

She did not do it for herself, but for other women:

Clougherty
and her mother were rattled but undeterred about speaking out. “It’s not an
easy decision, but I just see it as a moral obligation,” Clougherty said. “I
really want to help other women.” In January, Clougherty filed
a civil suit against Lonsdale, accusing him of sexual abuse. She
called his behavior “violent and deviant,” saying he employed “psychological
manipulation and coercion” including “isolation, sleep deprivation, food
deprivation.” She also accused him of “strangling her, slapping her, scratching
her, yanking her by the hair so hard that he would lift her torso off the bed
and slamming her body against the walls and bed boards.” In addition, she sued
Formation 8 for being negligent in its supervision during the summer she was
doing the project with Rachel. The lawsuit states that she “wrote him numerous
emails and love letters to let him know how much she cared about him in the
hope that it would end the abuse.”

And yet, what do you think that this level of public
exposure will do for her future dating and marital prospects. One needs to
understand that making oneself a public spectacle, even for a good cause, even
when one is in the right, exacts a heavy price.

Alternately, we might imagine that once her relationship
with Lonsdale was over, Clougherty believed that she could never again be a
virgin, never again be innocent, and thus that she could never be the
respectable wife of another man. If that was her belief, her therapist inadvertently sustained it.

As for the way therapy changed Clougherty, her friend Jane
noted this:

In the
months after
Jane helped Clougherty break up with Lonsdale, she says that she watched with
increasing unease as Clougherty’s accusations mounted, from emotional abuse to
rape. “In March 2014, she texted me that she considered herself a ‘sex slave’
during her relationship with Joe,” Jane wrote in her statement. “This is far,
far beyond anything that she ever said about the relationship when it was
happening or for a long time afterward. It also made no sense in light of her
clear enthusiasm about the relationship.”

An amazing story, she's definitely here to teach us something, but not apparently what she thinks she's teaching.

re: Saylor told Clougherty that she was a mere victim, that she did not exercise free will at any time in the course of the relationship. Might we not recognize that this is wildly judgmental, that it defames and slanders Lonsdale and that it tells Clougherty that she was a mere puppet, manipulated by a brutal male oppressor.

re: Besides, if she was so easily manipulated by a male oppressor, how can we know whether she was also being manipulated by her therapist?

As summarized above, Therapist Keith Saylor was certainly at fault, although without first-hand knowledge of actual events, actual process, its hard to know.

It certainly shows the "power of the narrative" and that there are MANY sources of inspiration if you want fantasy abuser and manipulation, but if the purpose of therapy is to find a victim and abuser, therapy delivers.

What's most interesting as well is the side-step, Clougherty is not bringing this to public for clear justice or her own needs for closure, but for other naive young women who might be saved.

But what is she really trying to sell? Is she telling women they should be assertive, know who they are, and what they are willing to do and why, and how they can stop sexual advances they don't want? Or is she saying women can trust men, but as soon as these "predators" are identified, a godly woman can break out of the relationship before its too late?

And if it takes years of therapy to "figure out" you were abused, does she really think she can help other women see the warning signs any faster?

And if she could go back in time and talk to her former self, before she believed she was raped, could she tell this younger self how things were going to end up, and expect it would change her hope for the relationship? And if such a friend actually did exist, and tell her exactly that back then, who would be responsible if she ignored that advice?

Where does "clear thinking" happen in this process?

And more importantly, to the masculine reader, what lessons are there to be learned? How do WE avoid women who will "betray" after a relationship ends by reinterpreting herself as being abused while our side might as easily look like we were the one who was seduced.

And there are answers given in his words: “Sometimes I feel it’s very clear you are eager to engage sexually, but other times you will talk about me taking advantage of you and forcing myself on you as if there is this dirty old man/young innocent student dynamic, and I should feel badly about it. We will do something and then just a bit later you’ll talk as if ‘how can I stop you from making me do that?’ and yet earlier I honestly thought you wanted to.”

So that makes it crystal clear, she was giving mixed signals. She wanted "experience", but wanted no responsibility for that experience. She wanted him to want her, wanted him to act, and herself to be acted upon, and whenever that "good catholic" conscience arose, she switched sides, and pretended she had no responsibility for encouraging him.

So men, take note. This isn't a matter of "yes means yes", but there's something important there. You need "written proof" when a woman is being two-sided. And when the "good catholic" girl comes out and denies her own participation, you need to read her back her own words, and make her admit THAT is her too.

And if she can't rectify those two selves in her mind, and integrate them into personal responsibility, then she is TROUBLE, and she's better off screwing up another man's life than yours.

I thinking of the Greek Sirens of the immature feminine. Keep sailing, and if you're a king, you can listen and observe, but make sure you're tied firmly to the mast, and follow the straight and narrow path out of danger.

Ellie did not "drop out". She managed to graduate from Stanford (completing her coursework online). She is currently a grad student and I do not believe it is correct to say she has "abandoned" career plans. I mainly hold the mother accountable. For pushing, pushing, pushing her fragile daughter into this relationship then crying "foul" when it didn't pan out.

I thought her definition interesting: (@3:20)"Your boundaries are no different than your feelings."

It would seem to contradict a mission of this blog, to devalue feelings, to not trust them, and certainly this story shows how a narrative can drive feelings, and assign external responsibility to something that deserves coresponsibility.

She also says @8:15 Its hard for us to set boundaries because:--------------1. We put other peoples needs and wants first.2. We don't know ourselves.3. We feel as if we don't have rights.4. We feel setting boundaries jeopardizes the relationship.5. We never learn to have healthy boundaries.--------------

I'd imagine all of these apply to the woman in the story. At least when you admit there's a reason for not standing up for yourself, that's taking a tiny step towards responsibility.

Later for an example on boundaries the video says: (@15:40) Write down a list of 10 things you're most unhappy about in your current reality. Are there any boundaries that I'm crossing in this experience?

I tried this experiment on myself, and found the unfortunate situation that half of the items were related to dishonesty, my own rather than any awareness of anyone elses. Some of it can be altruistic, protecting others from things they can't help with, but some definitely affect others negatively.

Anyway, perhaps if I'd talk to Ellie, I'd recommend dropping the legal suit as unhelpful and looking at her own sense of personal boundaries first.

What's interesting is were I her I'm sure I'd feel great shame at exposing the intimacy of a failed relationship but strangely when she can conclude she was a victim, she's willing to be exposed, even if she looks naive, since she can beleive at least she's not manipulative and controlling like her abusive boyfriend.

But if she was in touch with her "real feelings", rather than the ones constructed by narratives of "what you're supposed to feel now", I'm sure that public exposure would carry a much higher risk, but as well suddenly become irrelevant for the world to know, since it would be at best boring to admit she has work to do.

There's no one to save, except herself, from her own ability to disown her own choices or refusal to choose and be responsible for what happens next.